Portal:Water/The Halliburton Loophole

In 2005, at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney, Congress created the so-called "Halliburton loophole" to federal water safety laws to prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from regulating this process, despite its demonstrated contamination of drinking water. In 2001, Cheney's "energy task force" had touted the benefits of hydrofracking, while redacting references to human health hazards associated with hydrofracking; Halliburton, which was previously led by Cheney, reportedly earns $1.5 billion a year from its energy operations, which relies substantially on its hydrofracking business.

According to Pro Publica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten, the EPA under Christine Todd Whitman's tenure as Administrator engaged in secret negotiations with industry, while supposedly addressing drinking water issues related to hydrofracking. In 2004, the EPA undertook a study on the issue and "the EPA, despite its scientific judgment that there was a potential risk to groundwater supplies, which their report clearly says, then went ahead and very surprisingly concluded that there was no risk to groundwater," Lustgarten said in September 2009. "[P]art of my reporting found that throughout that process the EPA was closer than seemed comfortable with the industry. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests for some documents and found conversations between Halliburton employees and the EPA researchers, essentially asking for an agreement from Halliburton in exchange for more lax enforcement. The EPA, in these documents, appeared to offer that and agree to that. And it doesn’t appear, by any means, to have been either a thorough or a very objective study." (http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/3/fracking_and_the_environment_natural_gas)